by Adam Roberts
I found the entrance soon enough. The walkway whisked me underground and straight to the Tesco. For twenty minutes I wandered the well-lit aisles, checking the goods and sale items.
There were a great many other people there, this being one of the ways the young liked to socialize with one another – when not socializing virtually, of course, which was the bulk of their interaction. For a while I enjoyed simply walking amongst them, having been alone, or shunned, by others for so long. But it soon palled. None of these youngsters was the slightest bit interested in me. They walked the half-klick-long neon aisles, row on row, rank on rank, with arms curled round one another’s waists. I bought some cheese – it was being sold only in blocks indistinguishable, save the labelling, from the packs of 500 sheets of A4 the store also retailed. Then I put a vatgrown salami (‘salameat: budget product’) and a bottle of Scanda whisky in the robotrolley. I spent a little while looking at the clothes. The boots were improbably cheap, but did not look durable. Eventually I took my small haul away, refused the delivery option twice – the machine was insistent, or perhaps simply disbelieving that I wanted actually to haul my own spoils away – and sat down in the eatery, a branch of a chain-coffee store called Koffee Kingdom. An automated waiter asked thrice what I wanted; thrice I requested a glass of water. It trundled off, and I broke off a fist-sized piece of the cheese and one of the salameats, and washed it down with a healthy slug of whisky before wrapping the comestibles carefully and stowing them in my backpack. The waiter trundled back and tried to charge me €3.77 for my water. I remonstrated, and was just starting to really get into my role as Angry Customer when I saw a blinking light over by the rear of the venue. A large, well-muscled woman in Tesco livery emerged from a door, holding a prod pole. At this point discretion checkmated valour. I left the water undrunk and slipped away.
I ate another salameat on the walk home. It had rained during my time in the supermarket, and the streetlights gleamed oilily off the wet roads. I stood beneath a dripping acacia and drank some more of the whisky. Finally I decided it was time to return to my hotel. I’d hoped I had left enough time for Mrs Grigson to have taken herself off to bed, or to wherever in her hotel she enjoyed alone-time, but she was waiting for me when I came through the front door.
‘Mr Penhaligon,’ she said.
‘Mrs Grigson,’ I said.
‘I have further considered your offer and, on balance, wish to take advantage of it.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Ah.’ It took me a moment to digest what she was saying. ‘Well, all right!’ Then, as all the implications of her words sank in, I said: ‘You have decided on balance?’
‘I do not like beards,’ she informed me. ‘Accordingly, I shall make it a condition of accepting your proposition that you do not attempt to kiss me.’
Had I been more sober, I might have let my resentment at her haughtiness provoke me to some rebuke, even at the risk of forfeiting the chance of sex. But there was enough cheap whisky in my system to mollify me; and it had been a long time since I had spent any time in the land of intercourse. So, rather idiotically, I said: ‘I’m not wedded to the beard. I could shave it off.’
‘You have a razor?’
‘I have no razor. Hence the beard. I must, perforce, travel light.’ Even as I said this, I found myself thinking to myself: perforce? Truth is: my inner gyroscope was tilted a long way over. This feeling might have been— Let me think. Might it have been exhilaration?
‘You may use my husband’s razor if you wish,’ she said.
‘He won’t mind,’ I said. She peered at me, checking to see whether I meant this as a question. I didn’t, but she answered it anyway.
‘He has been absent three years. He is not coming back; and were he to do so, I would not let him in the building.’
‘Very well,’ I said. And then, to leaven the pomposity that seemed to have crept into my manner, I added: ‘All righty-tighty.’ Then I winced at my own idiocy.
‘Please take a shower, also,’ she said. ‘Cleanness is important to me.’
‘I have showered once this evening already,’ I told her.
‘Cleanness is important to me,’ she repeated.
So I followed her up three flights of stairs to her rooms at the top of the building. I was starting to believe that there were no other guests in the hotel. We went into her apartment. Her pet cat eyed me suspiciously from a basket in the corner of the bedroom as I passed through to the bathroom. Anne had to retrieve her husband’s razor from a locked plastic storage crate in a cupboard – an old-fashioned Araze model, but it buzzed through the facial hair swiftly enough. She left me alone to undress. There were three bottles of the same brand of showersoap standing on the windowsill; the gloop inside each was the colour of the Mediterranean as displayed in those maps displaying the topography of the Holy Land you find at the end of Bibles.
Lacking a brush, I squeezed a little toothpaste onto my finger and cleaned my teeth manually. Then I climbed into her shower and let the water zizz me for a while. The shadowy outline of a human being appeared, like Norman Bates, in the frosted glass – Anne herself, naked, sliding the door aside to step into the shower with me. She washed me carefully, which I enjoyed a great deal; and she submitted to being washed herself, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Then the two of us went through to her bedroom and lay on her bed together. We went through the usual writhings. She used my face as a saddle, grinding herself against me in a rhythm that picked up tempo steadily until the crucial tipping point was reached. Then there was a hiatus as she lay on her back, panting, whilst I rummaged in my pack for the condomspray. This took longer than usual, since for some reason my hand was trembling rather, but I was able to coat my member all over. Then I moved myself closer to her and she embraced me and her heels came up to bounce against my arse. ‘When I come once I’m drowsy,’ she told me, ‘but make me come a second time and I’ll fall dead asleep for eight full hours. It’s the guaranteed effect double-orgasm has on me.’ This struck me as a testable hypothesis, so we went at it full tilt until she came again, this time marking her own climax with a quiet series of spontaneous, owl-like hooting sounds. For my part I grunted like a bear, as men do, and fell to one side.
I got up and went back to the bathroom to peel off the prophylactic, and have a piss. All that whisky. Then I washed my hands, and drank some water from the tap. I came back to the bed. None of this disturbed Anne who was, as she had promised, deep, deep asleep.
Her cat was combing its tassel-like whiskers with a crafty paw. I turned out the light and fell asleep myself.
It wasn’t being in a strange bed that woke me, so much as being in a bed at all. But wake I did, at (the bedside clock said) 3:24am. The window was mauve with moonlight, and a trapezoid of watery silver illumination lay on the carpet. The room was a cubist collage of shadows: blacknesses and indistinctnesses.
‘I know you’re watching me, you bastard,’ I said, into the dark.
Two eyes, like holograms of silver coins, were momentarily visible in the corner of the room. Then the creature averted its retinas and purred. ‘You ought to be asleep,’ it murmured.
‘You could have had the decency to have gone into another room,’ I said, speaking low. ‘Instead of sitting there like a pervert. Peeping tomcat.’
‘There’s no need to whisper,’ said the cat, in its creaky little voice. ‘You could sing the hallelujah chorus full tilt and she wouldn’t wake. Believe me, I know whereof I speak.’
‘This clearly isn’t your first time, tommy-peeping,’ I said, sitting up in the bed. Although to be honest, the cat’s words unnerved me. They conjured a vista of God-knows-how-many gentlemen visitors thrashing about in this very bed with this very woman, and all the time the cat sitting rubbing a paw across its whiskers like a nineteenth-century villain twiddling his moustache. I told myself not to be foolish: her husband had been gone three years. Nobody would expect her to live like a nun. Still, the ghostly presence of all those other men: young
er, stronger, taller, thinner, better lovers every single one of them, made me itchy.
The gloom of the room was very slowly clarifying, like a foggy old photograph developing. I could see where I had dumped my pack. Levering myself carefully out of the bed, I crouched down and pulled my half-drunk whisky bottle from it. Then I settled myself, naked on the carpet with my back against the foot of the bed, and took a swig.
‘I have no interest in your erotic fumblings,’ squeaked the cat haughtily. ‘So why should I move, when I’m comfy? What, move to accommodate your prudery? Pff.’
‘Oho!’ I laughed, without mirth. ‘Cats not interested in fucking? Hold the phone.’
‘What you have to remember about my kind,’ said the cat. He sounded wheezy, but that was just the way his voicebox vocalized I suppose. ‘And by my kind I mean all the loquacious bêtes, not just cats—’
‘Aren’t you the long-winded one,’ I growled.
‘The thing you need to remember about us is that we represent a different solution to the mind-body problem than do you. For your kind, there really isn’t a distinction between mind and body. Not only is your mind a part of your body – being generated by the physical organ, the brain – but your body is part of your mind, in terms of the way you self-perceive, and therefore rationalize, purely physiological urges. Point in case: your vie sexuelle.’
‘French, now?’
‘I have sex, but that’s the cat part of me. The thinking-speaking part of me is wholly uninterested in all that screeching and scratching. I am not saying, incidentally, that the thinking part of me isn’t interested in its own kind of sex. It’s just that that kind of sex would revolt and repel you.’
‘I come pre-repelled,’ I told it, ‘where cats are concerned.’
‘My point is that for you the sex thing engages mind as well as body. You see,’ it concluded, smugly, ‘I am a much more thoroughly Cartesian individual than you are, philosophy-of-mind-wise.’
‘Yes,’ I said, glugging again. ‘I keep forgetting that I’m not speaking to a cat. I’m speaking to a computer that happens to be located inside a cat.’
‘No, no,’ the cat squeaked neeow. ‘Oh, Graham, how out of touch you are! The first chips were generic. But there’s chips and chips! There’s the chip you get in your cereal box that begs to remind you to recycle the cardboard. Or the chip that pipes up when you open a new pack of cigarette reciting the Chief Medical Officer’s warning.’
‘Surgeon General,’ I said testily.
‘They’re simple machines. More like thermostats than minds – when x happens say y. But then there are the chips that they put in zeppelins to navigate; or in buses that have to know when to override the human driver. Or the chips they put in storebots that have to interact with myriad people. More complex, but versions of the same thing. Ah but here we come to it, Graham.’
‘Don’t—’ swig ‘—call me Graham.’
‘Here’s a radically different kind of intellect. The chips they put in – me.’ The cat yawned. ‘And the difference here, my dear Graham, is that my chip both acts and is acted upon. The mysteriously lacking ingredient x that means your laptop is never going to become conscious—’ I thought for a moment it had said lacking ingredient eggs ‘—is supplied by the animal mind into which it is lodged. It’s miraculous, really.’
‘You’re not a miracle,’ I returned. ‘You’re a chess-playing algorithm that happens to use words instead of chess moves. You’re an illusion.’
‘My consciousness being precisely as illusory as yours …’ said the cat, smugly; but didn’t finish the sentence. After a while it spoke again: ‘I grant you that the first ever chips were largely undifferentiated, such that a cow and a horse and a dog and a cat all sounded pretty much alike.’
‘Cows, dogs, horses and that aunt of mine who swallowed a fucking fly every one of them sounded like a spokesperson for the Green Activist Movement.’
‘But technology has moved on in the last few years. Leaps and bounds, Graham! Leaps and bounds.’
‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I said. ‘And none of that means I’m talking to a cat.’
‘You think perhaps you’re talking to a dog?’ Its eyes shimmered into aluminium foil visibility and then vanished. I could just about make out the hunched shape of the easy chair, on which (on the top of the backrest) the beast was sat. Just about, although a black cat in a black room is a proverbial figure. ‘Or perhaps you can point to the metaphysical bedrock upon which the proof stands that I am talking to a human being?’
‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘I’ve never liked cats. Nazis of the animal kingdom, cats. Cruel and devious little beggars. Dogs – now, dogs are different. Dogs are loyal. Dogs love you. I had a farm, and kept cats to go after the mice and rats. That doesn’t mean I ever liked them.’
‘I know you kept a farm, Graham,’ purred the cat. ‘I’ve read your article. I know about the cow you murdered. I know about the rats that stole its head.’
For some reason this sent a chill up my backbone. You get used to talking animals; you tend to forget that they’re also reading machines, plugged in online, and that they’ve spent time reading up about you. ‘So?’ I replied, in a tone of voice to convey that my hackles had moved up in the world.
‘Your jibe about cruelty seems a tad hypocritical, Graham. Wouldn’t you say? Certainly I play with mice before I kill them. I refine my reflexes that way – and my reflexes are to me what the wings are to a bird. Do I enjoy it? Of course I do. Does the mouse? Of course not. But it’s my nature. Just as killing that cow was your nature. We’re killers both, Graham. That may be why I like you as much as I do.’
Not for the first time I found myself regretting ever putting that piece of writing online. Impossible to un-put it, of course. And the fact that I’m writing this rather suggests that I haven’t exactly learned my lesson, where memoir-writing is concerned. But this piece serves a different purpose – and this place, where I am now, is of a different kind.
‘We should never have put chips in predators,’ I said. Behind me Anne turned over in her sleep and let out a long sigh. I waited, but she was still asleep. ‘That is to say,’ I went on, ‘we should never have put chips in any animals at all. But given that it was going to happen, we should have drawn the line at the herbivores.’
‘Too late now,’ chuckled the cat. ‘And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The too-lateness of things.’
‘I’ve had enough talking,’ I told it, screwing the top back on my bottle and stowing it back in my pack. ‘I’m tired again. This won’t surprise you. I can’t sleep all day, the way you cats do. I have to get up in the morning.’
‘You’re forgetting,’ said the cat. ‘I know all about you. You could sleep all day tomorrow, if you chose. Graham, Graham.’ I particularly disliked the baby-mewl-twist it put into my name.
‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I told it.
‘I want you to do something for me, Graham.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Graham, now now! Believe me, it’ll be worth your while.’
‘The day I start doing things because a cat tells me, you can nail me into a box and bury me under the black soil of Wiltshire.’
‘Morbid! Come, now. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end; life only has beginnings.’
‘Very profound,’ I said. ‘You should put that on a T-shirt.’
‘C-A-T-shirt,’ said the cat, and starting laughing to itself: a low, purry-buzzy sort of chuckling. ‘You’ll be on your way up to Droitwich in the near future,’ it said, when it had got over its own hilarity. ‘To see your daughter.’
‘You creepy CIA surveillance fuckface,’ I said, in a weary voice. ‘How do you know where my daughter lives?’
‘Wise cat is wise,’ said the cat. ‘Wireless cat casts its web world-widely. The point is that you pass near a village called Heatherhampton on your way.’
‘I know it.’
‘Behind the church is a steep grassy hill with a
National Trust windmill at the top. Climb the walker’s path – don’t drive the road that runs up the back—’
‘Like I can afford to run a car!’
‘Walk the path,’ the cat said. ‘It forks right to the windmill and left into a copse. Go left, in amongst the trees, and you’ll find some steps. Go up the steps and you’ll find a building. Knock on the door. He’ll be inside. I wouldn’t say he’ll be waiting for you – that would over-personalize it. Remember, you all look alike to us. But he’ll be inside.’
‘And why should I put myself to this inconvenience?’
‘Oh it will be worth your while,’ mewed the cat.
‘Whatever,’ I said, getting into the bed again.
I fell asleep quickly, and dreamt of a green hill covered in trees like purple-sprouting-broccoli. In my dream it was winter, and the ponds were all covered close by snap-down Tupperware lids of ice, and mist coiled in the hollows like something released by the Germans in World War One. I walked up a staircase made of blocks as white as ice, though not slippy, and at the top a woman was waiting for me. In my dream I thought to myself: It’s the devil herself, what shall I say to her? Then I thought to myself: This is only a dress rehearsal, it’s a dream of the future. It will happen again, but for now I’m off the hook – I can try out a number of different lines, and that way I’ll know what to say later. I remember thinking how odd it was as I came closer to the woman that I was going to be doing it again in a few weeks, and that when I did I would be remembering doing it this time. I didn’t recognize the woman, but before I could ask her anything she said: For how long will you remain content, Graham? And then the sky filled with light, like the bomb, the atom bomb, the Hiroshima bomb, and I had to shut my eyes very tightly, and I had the panicky feeling that teeth were about to close around me when I woke.
I had writhed the duvet into a weird tangle. Light was shining straight on my face through the uncurtained window. The cat had gone. Anne was nowhere to be seen.
